Katherine Parrish

I am not a proficient coder. My dad taught me Basic when I was 11, which was great fun. I didn’t do a lot with it, but it gave me a foundational understanding of how to communicate with computers- the syntax, the grammar, maybe? My next coding experience was also my deepest. In 1998, I discovered and fell in love with MOOs: Multi-User Object Oriented environments. By the time I reluctantly left them behind, cause no one was playing there anymore, I had not only learned how to muck with my own player code, and create word-play experiences in what I called the MOOlipo, I also knew how to “create” (install?) and host a MOO of my own. But the language used in most MOOs was its own entity- and not transferable.

After that, I needed to spend time learning the codes of teaching in the high school classroom. There was little time left over. (although I did dabble in writing interactive fiction using Inform)

But I’ve missed having the ability to do things with words like I did in the MOOlipo. So, during the The Cyborg Hackeur Workshop, led by the genial and generous Leonardo Flores, I found myself bouncing and squealing, and generally terrorizing the dog, because I learned that I could use ChatGPT to write code that would do just that!

This is what I’ve made, starting in the workshop, and then completed on my own:

And this is how I made it:

This is a heavily edited screen recording of the process- it only shows what I did with the code after the conference. I wanted to show the dialogue between me and the AI.

I’m still amazed by how much I can use “natural language” to communicate what I want, and how easily and accurately ChatGPT translates my vision into code.

Another thing I love is the summary ChatGPT provides after creating an iteration of the code. It explains how it did what it just did, which, as Leo pointed out during the workshop, creates an opportunity to deepen one’s understanding of the code. Yes, set my pedagogical synapses a’firing.

They had already been stoked, cause Leonardo Flores is a wonderful teacher, as students of his in the workshop attested. He provided everything we needed to take what we’d learned further, and encouraged us to contact him to ask questions, and to share stuff we’ve made. I plan to spend some significant time with his publications!

Leo also directed our attention to Taper, an online journal for computational poetry (<3) and literary art, with which he is involved in an editorial capacity. Taper only accepts submissions whose code is no larger than 2 kilobytes. He also invited us to submit work for the upcoming issue.

Everything about this journal appeals to me! I don’t know if I’ll submit something, but I do intend to keep playing with code, doing thing things with words, and little letters.
What joy!